Top Nazi (28 page)
In the meantime, the main suspect was sitting in jail shortly after the explosion. He was Georg Elser, a cabinetmaker from Königsbronn, near Heidenheim in Württemberg. He had the bomb from an alarm clock, using an electric battery and dynamite, and in the night had secretly built it into the column of the Bürgerbräukeller. Then he traveled without luggage by train to Lake Constance, looking for a place to hide in Switzerland. He felt that the best chances would be where Constance and Kreuzlingen are so close together that one can hardly be differentiated from the other. In a beer garden, close to the border, a member of the National Socialist Paramilitary Motor Corps, who was at the border as an assistant, apprehended him. Rather than driving around, the officer was waiting for his girlfriend (the waitress) to send the last guests home. Cursing, he did his duty and skipped the tryst, taking the suspect to the police.
Elser was questioned, but no one got anything out of him. They considered whether they should just lock him up in a concentration camp. But
then they found out that he had been a Communist at some point, had been in a concentration camp and in addition to that, in his jacket pocket, they found a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller. The news gave renewed hope to the SS leaders and detectives gathered in Munich where Elser was brought. He confessed, but what he said was not enough for them. For those protecting Hitler’s safety, it was a miserable commentary that a single man without help and without an organization behind him almost managed to kill their Führer. “We are not satisfied with one man,” criticized Wolff in a letter to an SS leader reporting the results. But there was nothing more to be obtained from Elser, even though Himmler himself had questioned and tortured him. He was sent to a concentration camp, but was treated gently. Possibly the Gestapo hoped they could use him in some way. He was killed only during the last days of the war.
Wolff felt that the Munich assassination attempt prevented a conspiracy of army generals from turning into a coup against the dictator. The military men wanted to take Hitler prisoner and prevent him from continuing the pointless war in the west. They gave up their plan since the apparently miraculous way Hitler’s life was saved increased the belief among the people that he was protected by Providence and had been chosen for something great. The generals supposedly did not want to compete with so much popularity and admiration.
Where Wolff obtained information about the subversive plans by the generals remains an open question. Could it be from his friend Reinhard Heydrich? Certainly not from the military, since the “personal credit” of an SS Gruppenführer and confidant of Himmler could not have been that high. It is true, however, that Wolff was making serious efforts at that time to be trusted in officers’ circles. To show the Wehrmacht his good will, for example, he would use a letter from Lance Corporal Hermann Weinrich, who in peacetime was an Obersturmbannführer in the General SS, and wrote to Himmler from the western front. Weinrich complained in his letter that he and other members of the SS in the same infantry unit, being non-Christians who believed in God, were repeatedly ordered to go to church, since their regiment was temporarily assigned to a position in a backward little town. When he refused he was threatened with a court-martial for refusing to obey an order. He wanted to know from Himmler if he had to follow such an order and if there were regulations forcing him to go to Christian church services.
This apparently harmless incident involved a troubled area in the relations between the SS and the Wehrmacht. The new heathens were really
bothering the military, who still believed in the alliance between the state and the churches and were convinced that victories were a gift from the Almighty. Many officers referred to the godless Marxist Spartakists, whom they blamed for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, having stuck a knife in the back of their army “undefeated in the field” by fomenting a revolution at home. In addition, in their circles the principle of “an order is an order” was important. If a column was ordered during a march to get out of line and go to the right and the left of the road to urinate, then every soldier was expected to obey. Those who didn’t have to or couldn’t go should simply pretended to; the same applied to church services: the pagan did not have to say the Our Father, so long as he simply followed the command: “Helmet off to pray.”
Himmler did not want to deal with this delicate matter, and so the Weinrich letter ended up with Wolff on January 6, 1940. He remembered—even though with the long delay that was normal for Wolff—his friend Major Radke when he was planning Himmler’s speech to the generals. On April 25 he asked the major in a letter “to examine this matter and then let me know your opinion.” He added a P.S.: “Please prevent this unfortunate man from being slaughtered.”
By May 1940 Wolff could say, as member of the Führer’s headquarters, that he had witnessed almost all key events. On March 18, 1940, he traveled on the Führer’s special train for a meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass, not just as a decorative extra, as Hitler usually employed him at meetings with foreign statesmen. Wolff was used as a temporary honorary officer to escort the Duce and develop contacts with allied leaders. Besides that he was attempting to speed up a stalled initiative assigned to Himmler since June 23, 1939.
Back at that time, on Hitler’s order, a regional headquarters was set up by the SS for “Immigration and Re-emigration,” the job of which was to organize the return of the South Tyroleans into the Reich, after the Führer sacrificed his right to the predominantly German-speaking region to his friend, the Duce, in return for his support of the Anschluss of Austria, the “Ostmark.” The regional headquarters in the meantime increased to a much bigger Regional Headquarters of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Tradition. But despite all this, little had happened in the South Tyrol. Wolff was responsible because the regional headquarters remained at first connected to the personal staff. By the end of 1939 almost all German-speaking residents of the area, including the Ladiner, had signed up on the resettlement lists. They were
tired of almost two decades of harassment to turn them into real Italians. An Italo-German agreement gave them the assurance that they could take their assets and movable property with them and would be compensated for their land. The SS “Ahnenerbe” went to work to record and inspect German art and cultural artifacts. The foundation was attached to Himmler’s office, where scientists and those Himmler thought were scientists worked on an array of projects. Because the “Ahnenerbe” was part of the personal staff, Wolff was doubly entitled to handle resettlement issues. This was to be accomplished—as agreed—by December 31, 1942, at the latest.
The operation became a model of true ethnic friendship, but it turned out that the “Rome-Berlin Axis” was not enough to justify the initiative. All those involved were expecting something different from the resettlement. Himmler and Hitler—at least at the beginning—wanted to use the South Tyroleans as settlers for conquered regions or regions yet to be conquered in the east, and at the same time they wanted to have a quiet border at the Brenner. The Italians also expected tranquility, especially in the regions that had been rebellious until then, but they were only willing to allow the most vocal supporters of autonomy cross the border. The others would—or so they hoped—then allow themselves to be reeducated as Italians without opposition. Now they found out that wealthy city dwellers just like the farmers living high up in the alpine pastures wanted to leave their homeland. The valley regions would need to be populated by emigrants from the impoverished Italian south, but they could not create a flourishing economy. There were no applicants for the mountains farms; if they managed to lure an Italian family there, it secretly returned to its former region very quickly. These people suffered from loneliness and the raw climate of the peaks and valleys, and were unable to take the physically harsh and sometimes dangerous work. For that reason Italian authorities did not want to let the South Tyroleans leave.
Wolff’s great negotiating skill was useless in this situation. Even the South Tyroleans were not in such a hurry to resettle. They calculated that as citizens of the Reich, they would soon be called to arms. As Italian citizens, they were exempt from military service—at least for the time being, because the Duce was hesitant about going to war, as the “Pact of Steel” treaty stipulated. He first wanted to be sure who was going to win. In addition there was trouble when a commission began arguing about artworks of German heritage that were to be released for export to Germany. When Wolff returned to South Tyrol three years later as High SS
and Police Chief in Italy, the experts were still arguing, few people had left the region, and only gullible dreamers still dared discuss their resettlement in the east.
Wolff traveled extensively during the phony war. While the generals at the Führer’s headquarters were busy preparing new “victories,” decorative figures such as himself could be spared. Around the end of the year he traveled to Poland as part of Himmler’s entourage. In the spring, the Reichsführer SS inspected numerous garrisons of Reserve units and the regiments deployed at the West Wall with the ever-present Wolff. He also inspected concentration camps: Buchenwald near Weimar in early April, Flossenbürg in the Upper Palatinate, and Dachau near Munich at the end of the month. Before that, Himmler and Wolff went around the areas annexed to East Prussia, and inspected a newly formed “Death’s Head Division” (Totenkopfstandarte), then went to Warsaw. There, Himmler and Wolff stayed at the prime minister’s residence—a sign of respect for SS leaders; in the meantime everyone else in their entourage had to stay in hotel rooms.
Wolff was in Berlin for the Führer’s birthday on April 20. This time it was only celebrated at the Chancellery where at noon Reichsführer SS and Chief of the Personal Staff Wolff congratulated Hitler. In May, a few days before his own fortieth birthday, Wolff got happy news from the Reich Chancellery. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general of the SS Reserves. However, he did not receive any military assignments; he had the insignia of rank, but no troops.
The Reserve troops, to whom he now belonged, had their black sheep, and he knew who they were. When he occasionally took foreigners or even the members of Himmler’s “circle of friends” to visit the concentration camps in peacetime, the “Totenköpfler” or “Death’s Head,” as the future mass murderer Adolf Eichmann called them, were the guard units. On such occasions, the visitors would hardly have witnessed anything terrible. They were shown the “vermin” of humanity being reeducated to civic honesty in an admittedly strict manner, behind high barbed wire fences but with justice and without physical violence. When asked, Wolff even admitted that there were individual excesses and acts of brutality by the guards. But Wolff cautioned that those guilty were severely punished so that a concentration camp prisoner in Germany was safer from poverty and death than any U.S. citizen who went for a walk in a New York park at night.
If at the time he really believed all that, he later had to admit that his view of the Black Corps was not quite right. On May 5, 1940, wearing his
general’s epaulettes, Wolff visited Himmler’s friend “Globus,” the former Vienna gauleiter Odilo Globocnik, who now was an SS Gruppenführer in the office of the SS and Police Chief for the area of Lublin in southern Poland. This unscrupulous man was about to build a large concentration camp for Jews and Poles. Besides that, on assignment from the Führer, he had to establish three smaller camps into which one could continuously send in more people, even if none of the prisoners ever left it alive. The “Death’s Head”—named that way because of an additional skull on their collars, which the rest of the SS wore as nickel-plated metal on their hatbands—supervised the construction being carried out by the prisoners. During lunch at the officer’s mess, it was casually mentioned that a euthanasia team was being transferred there very soon. On that occasion, Wolff met SS Standartenführer Hermann Fegelein, who belonged to an equestrian SS unit, and would later be his successor at Führer headquarters.
On May 6, 1940, Himmler’s adjutant Jochen Peiper noted “continuation of the program”—namely a discussion and tour of Lublin, regarding Globocnik’s future assignments. Included was the “return flight to Berlin.” An event was planned there that Himmler and Wolff could not miss: the offensive in the west. When, how, and where this would take place was still unknown to everyone in Germany. Bormann’s forecast came true, however, that the gentlemen at the Führer’s headquarters should be prepared to leave in Hitler’s special train.
By May 9 the time had come. Once more the departure took place without fanfare and went unnoticed by the public, even though it was shortly after 4:00 p.m. The train was waiting at the small suburban train station of Finkendrug, a weekend excursion near Berlin on the way to Spandau-Nauen. The trip began towards the northwest, in the direction of Hamburg, “to keep up the deception” as Bormann noted in his diary. Indeed many passengers suspected the train was going to Norway. But then after Celle the train turned, continuing west and finally stopping in total darkness at a train station where the signs, in the town’s name, had been removed. It was Euskirchen, west of Bonn, where the column of cars that they had used in Poland was waiting. Across the Münstereifel they traveled to the “hideout” in Eifeldorf Rodert, a hill made of concrete bunkers, anti-aircraft gun positions, and barracks converted into a headquarters. The previous evening, Hitler asked for the weather report forecasting clear flying weather. With that piece of news, he ordered the attack to begin at 5:30 a.m.
The men and women (Hitler’s secretaries) had hardly gotten into the cars when the heavy artillery on the broad western front began firing. They were far removed from danger and no one needed to be a hero. Most of the participants were busy directing the battle. What Wolff was doing in the “hideout” from May 10 through June 3 will have to be left to the reader’s imagination; the military could not and would not use him and SS fighting units in the west were so few that they needed no special representative at headquarters. There were three SS divisions and one regiment, which were never deployed together.